Bio-Polygraphs, Nonconsensual Data, and the Suspicious Body of the Unaccompanied Minor

• In Event: Personhood, Law, and Relationality Amidst the New Biosciences II

Abstract

Over the last century, the category of ‘child’ has been the result of a large margin of error, as well as inexact science; deducible from an erupted third molar, carpal x-rays, and even minute-long visual appraisals. In this paper, I aim to examine the ascent of age-verifying medical technologies within Western border-politics — from the use of bone densitometry, to GeoSentinel Surveillance data — focusing explicitly on the deconstruction of refugee and migrant bodies into flattened bio-polygraphs. I will argue that these technologies, as well as ‘border science’ more generally, occupies a moralised legal landscape, where bodies are deemed either truthful or untruthful; capable of superseding any contestation as the child transforms into non-child within the law itself. Case studies from both the British and Australian court systems will be utilised, with particular attention directed towards B (R on the application of) v Mayor and Burgesses of the London Borough of Merton [2003], and The Queen v Astar Udin and Sania Aman [2000]. Indeed, the language of biological hyper-visibility, found within these documents, will be shown to entangle with select scientific terminology, reducing complex human experiences into indistinguishable lists of the physical and microbial. However, the legal rhetoric will also be seen as capable of re-mattering the very categorical markers of child-ness — presenting an opportunity to destabilise a normative imaginary of childhood. It invites a conceptualisation of a non-adult personhood which is less containable, and more prone to shifting physiological parameters.

Author

• Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar, University of Sydney